The Haunted Storm (22 page)

After a minute the woman at the counter called “Bacon, egg and chips.”

Alan got up to collect it. Matthew watched the way he moved: it fascinated him. Alan was simply so conscious of every tiniest movement: he measured his footsteps as carefully as he measured his words. Maybe it was this that gave him the quality of power which was so apparent even when he sat still and said nothing. As an experiment, just for a second, while Alan was paying for his food, Matthew tried to become utterly conscious of himself and of the fact that he existed. He flung himself forward mentally against it, but his strength wasn’t equal to it, and he fell back. “Try again, you weakling,” he thought, “try again later.”

Alan ate swiftly, and pushed the plate away.

“So you want to know what racialism means?” he asked.

“I want to know what everything means. I want to know how close you are to Canon Cole. And how close you are to Elizabeth; and how close you are to the world, and I want to know what the world is, because I have less idea of the world than a baby has of nuclear physics, Yes, what is it, for God’s sake? This stuff, this reality; that’s the question at the root of it all.” He tapped the table, and moved his hands about to indicate everything. “But start with racialism, if you want. What’s that all about? It sounds like filthy rubbish to me, but I know nothing at all… anyway, carry on.”

Alan’s teacup stood in a pool of sunlight on the table top. The thick white glass it was made of gleamed and shone, and the dark tea glowed inside it. Alan put his hand out as if to lift it up and drink from it, but instead let his hand lie still on the table, the finger-tips just touching the saucer. Matthew watched it as his brother began to speak; occasionally the fingers would stir slightly, trembling, but otherwise it was absolutely motionless.

“You mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that I do anything,” Alan said. “I refuse to do anything; that’s closer to it. If you set out to do something you split your will into separate pieces, you reduce your strength. It seems easier to have something to act on, something to engage you; yes, it does, but it’s false. Let your will feed on itself. There’s no need to look at the world. The world can break against you time and time again, and keep coming, and keep breaking. It’s as false as water. If it’s stormy, like water, you see nothing in it, and if you look at it when it’s still, you see nothing but yourself. Better to ignore it. And what happens then? The strange thing is, instead of decreasing, you increase. Your will does very well on a diet of nothing but itself; it gets firmer and stronger. Then you notice that the world, if you take any notice of it at all, you notice that it gets quieter, as if you’ve made it unsure of itself. It shivers with anger or fear, sometimes. But you don’t attack it, you don’t make any move at all in the direction of the world, you leave it be. It’s quite simple…”

Matthew frowned. “But in some way I can’t describe I
am
the world. I’m bound up with the filth of it, the rag-and-bone shop of it, where all the ladders start. Like the poem. I asked
him
this, and I didn’t get a straight answer. So now I’ll ask you: what happens if this rock that you think you are suddenly gets swept away like a boat in the flood of things? What’s love, and what’s guilt, and why have they got such power over me?”

“They haven’t got any power over you at all. They are nothing to you. You don’t realise it you sway like a snake to their music, because it’s insidious and charming, because it touches your heart. And if you were only heart, you’d be as powerless as you think you are. The heart’s a child’s toy; and it grieves you to part with it… but it’s nothing, nothing at all. Get rid of it.”

“What about guilt? If you murdered someone – for whatever reason – and then you were haunted by grief for it, and if it kept you awake at night and made you dream about it with your eyes open in the daylight, if it got everywhere – in your clothes, in your eyes, in your teeth, like sand – what would you do? What does it mean? What
is
it? Now – oh Jesus, the thought sickens me, but listen: that first murder – did you read about it? Well, I was supposed to arrive at Harry’s the night it happened, but I had – I had a blinding headache – I get it sometimes – I had to go to bed, you see. Well, I don’t remember going to bed, that’s all! I woke up in the morning in a guest house bedroom – I suppose it was, but I couldn’t find anyone in the morning to pay, and so I just left – and when I went outside I found myself in the city here, but oh, I don’t remember a thing about the night before… And the same thing happened on Saturday, I fainted with the pain, and when I came to they found – it was in the playground; they found a girl, and she’d just been killed… so that’s why I went to the police. I told them I’d been there when it happened, that I was feeling ill and went out into the field to lie down, and that I didn’t see anything… That was the truth, too, but not the whole truth. I should have told them; it would help clear it up, at least, l suppose; but I was afraid. There was a sergeant there, and he took down what I’d said, and took my name and address… But tell me: where does guilt come into it?”

“Feed on it,” said Alan. “It’s all grist to the will.” He laughed harshly.

Well,
that
was true. He couldn’t get out of that. Then another thought struck him.

“But what about you? What about your fascism; tell me about that.”

“Fascism is mainly a theory of economics. Ours is mainly a theory of race. It gets nearer the heart of it. Our economics are fascist as far as they’re worked out. But as for race: the history of the world is a history of racial conflict. Some races prosper because they’re more highly gifted, others decay or never get started because their stock is poorer and thinner. The highest type of man is the white man, the lowest the blacks and the Jews. The white races have the duty of extending their mastery over the whole world, of dominating the other races, of promoting conflict… war is glory, and racial war is the clearest and noblest kind of war. That’s it.”

Matthew listened carefully; he could not bring himself to think that Alan meant it. But he
didn’t
mean it! His voice had a tone of mockery in it, and his eyes seemed to indicate that he was smiling. What was he getting at? And where was he, where was the centre from which he was speaking, if he didn’t mean it? What did he really feel?

“My case against that,” said Matthew, “is the same as Ivan Karamazov’s case against God and Sartre’s case for communism. And all it is, is: it’s worth nothing if people have to suffer. If you kill Jews, it cuts your right to claim superiority to them clean away. And if I – if I kill a little girl – then I
cannot
pretend to be unconnected with the world and set off to will myself into heaven. And that’s what I mean when I say that I am the world, that I’m bound up with it more closely than I know. The world’s inside me. Morality is objective and absolute. Why, I don’t know; but –” he shrugged, feeling desperate – “there it is.”

“You think so?” said Alan.

“Yes! You can’t cut out the world! I used to think you could, but… things are changing. The world is me. Or else… your emotions: yes, cut them out by all means, but do it when they’re functioning normally: when they’re healthy. “Don’t just jettison them because you can’t cope with them. Just because this guilt frightens me – I shouldn’t get rid of it just because of that, because it would be simple cowardice – you see? When everything’s functioning normally and ticking over by itself,
then
by all means step back, take a look at it, and cut it out if you want to. But now – what can I do about it now?”

“I should have thought it was ideal, from your point of view,” said Alan. “For one thing, you’ve got a grandstand view of morality working. Everything’s clearer in a crisis. That’s my point about war. As I said, watch it closely, observe it, feed on it. But don’t get neurotic about it. Neurotic people are people who choose to be childish, and that’s contemptible. Observe it. The more anguishing it gets, the clearer it’ll become: excellent! And I don’t want to fling a spanner into your works, and spoil it all, but tell me this: what exactly are you guilty of? Did you murder those girls?”

“I don’t know! But in any case that doesn’t alter what you’ve just said: because I
think
I am, and so I can still peer at this morality thing and the way it enmeshes with the world… and the real anguish comes from the fact that it
does
enmesh with the world, or seems to; so that I am the world… but I’m sick of that.”

He stopped. Alan was looking at him steadily. Matthew felt a little foolish, and went on:

“And of course that’s all my arse; and as soon as I’ve sorted out the truth of it, I’ll wave it good-bye and say thank God that’s done… but now, by Christ, I’ve got the bone of it between my teeth, and I’ll crack it to splinters before I’m through. So tell me this – because you didn’t answer when I asked you: how can you defend yourself against Ivan’s case? How does your theory of racial supremacy stand up against the suffering of one Jew in Auschwitz or one bombed church in Alabama?”

“It doesn’t,” said Alan calmly. “It can’t.”

“But then – but why? I mean why hold it?”

“For that very reason.”

Matthew, staggered, pushed back his chair and gaped. And then came another of those disturbing glimpses that he called clairvoyance: he seemed to see Alan as far above men and time as Canon Cole had been, when he had expounded his religion.

“Well, speak, for Gods sake,” he said; “go on, tell me why.”

“There’s no good in the world. What seems to be good is only illusion. Everything that you see and touch is false. And particularly everything that you feel, is false. The only way to arrive at the truth is to train yourself to disbelieve everything, everything. Now some things are noble or touching or beautiful, and those are the deadliest. But because your soul is formed in a certain way you cannot help being affected by them. The only defence against that is to see to it that your soul only touches the world at the spots where it is ugliest and most painful, so that you won’t be tempted to stay there and be taken in… is that clear enough?”

“Why not kill yourself?”

“That’s evading the issue.”

“I suppose it is.”

“That’s why I’m a racist. But there are a hundred other things that would serve the same purpose.”

“You’re exactly the same as Canon Cole; you’re a Gnostic.”

“Not in the way he is. He’s on the same road; but I don’t know which way he’s going… he’s unstable, he’s irrational. He doesn’t follow it through.”

“You know he thinks you’re his deadliest enemy?”

“Well, of course I am. I’d fight him to the death, if it was worth it. I
am
fighting him, constantly. But it changes: now I’m fighting against him, now with him against something else. I’m not clear about it myself. But understand this –”

Suddenly his hand clenched, the hand that had been resting on the table for so long: and whether or not he knocked the tea-cup in doing so, it lurched and fell over on to its side, and the tea splashed out on to the plastic table-top and flowed to the edge of it and spilled over, dripping on the floor. Alan didn’t move. Matthew had a second or two to notice that the cup itself was cracked completely in half: surely the table hadn’t jerked that much? – before his eyes were drawn to Alan’s again and held like iron to a magnet. Alan said:

“Understand this, that I repudiate him, and the world, the whole of it, and that I repudiate human life from its beginnings to its uttermost end, every single aspect of it. The greatest men who ever lived – what are they worth? Less than a flea. And do I say that because I have a jaundiced view of humanity and human greatness? Because I’m stunted and warped and perverted, and sick with envy and loathing? Answer that to yourself. Do I?”

No, thought Matthew, no, no…

“And do you think I’m blind, do you think I have a partial answer and a wicked one at that? Do you think I don’t reverence great men and think their greatness holy at the same time as accounting their worth as less than that of a flea?”

No, he thought. No!

“And would you say, if you had to answer for the truth of it to God, that my judgement was faulty in any detail, and that the values I set on things were false values? Wouldn’t you say that the values I describe are set on things as unmistakeably as the mark of Cain so that each thing and each thought is clear to me, and clear and naked to any man who looks at them and faces them directly?”

“No! No! No!”

Alan sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. And only then did Matthew realise truly how deeply exhausted his brother must be. He felt a wave of profound tenderness rise in his heart, and an urge to express it, to embrace him, to kiss him; but he sat still and said nothing. After a moment Alan opened his eyes again, and smiled, looking at the broken cup on the table.

“We’d better pay for this,” he said, and stood up.

He put the broken halves of the cup in the saucer, and went to the counter to pay. Matthew opened the door and wandered out into the street, waiting for him. He felt dizzy and exalted; the world was opening out in front of him, mists were clearing. What Alan had said about the values of things: that would have been incomprehensible to him a few days ago… or would it? Hadn’t he always known it?

Yes, yes; but he was still immersed in the flood of it, in the tide-race of sensations and emotions that surged around him; and he was only beginning, now, to learn to stand above it: to learn to see.

Alan came out of the cafe and they strolled along silently. They came to the bridge over the canal where Alan had disappeared the other day, and paused there for a few moments, looking down at the water.

“What about –” Matthew began – “what about this well? Canon Cole told me a theory of his – no, I won’t tell you what he said about it, because he thinks you’re his enemy; I won’t give his secrets away. But he said you wanted it; is that true?”

“Yes, I do want it.”

“Why? What is it? And what’s this Mithras business got to do with it? He was a god who killed a bull, wasn’t he? I can’t remember anything else about him.”